JAAF Says Tokyo Marathon Is Not a Large-Scale Event, Will Go Ahead

With sports events, concerts and other events canceling in response to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's call for large-events to be voluntarily suspended over the next two weeks as a step toward combating the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, on Feb. 27 the JAAF issued a statement saying that the Tokyo Marathon and other marathons scheduled for early March will go ahead as scheduled, saying that they "have only a few hundred runners each and do not meet the definition of large-scale events."

The events in question, all races that serve as qualifying events for the Tokyo Olympic team, are the Mar. 1 Tokyo Marathon, and the Lake Biwa Marathon and Nagoya Women's Marathon, both scheduled to be held Mar. 8. Having already been greatly reduced in scale through the elimination of their mass-participation fields, the number of runners in each race is expected to be around 200 in Tokyo, 300 at Lake Biwa and 130 in Nagoya.

JAAF executive Akira Kazama commented, "A large-scale marathon is one with participants in the thousands to tens of thousands. We opted to take measures to reduce the size of these races rather than cancel them." The government did not set specific criteria for what constitutes a large-scale event, leaving it up to the discretion of the event organizers to determine whether or not their event should be held.

source article:
https://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20200227-00000074-mai-spo
translated by Brett Larner